Introducing E-LIS

E-LIS is an international open archives for documents in Library and

Information Science, openly accessible to anyone. Students,

librarians, and LIS researchers are invited to search (it's free!),

and participate by depositing your own work - including BCLA Reporter

articles.

E-LIS (Eprints in Library and Information Science) was established by Research in Computing, Library, and Information Science (RCLIS) and Documents in Information Science (DoIS). There are over 3,000 eprints currently available to students and researchers in the LIS field in this constantly growing E-LIS archive.

E-LIS is maintained by an international team of librarians. The Canadian editorial team consists of Heather Morrison, Chief Editor (BC ELN), Andrew Waller (University of Calgary), Kumiko Vezina (Concordia University), and Shelley Brown (Richmond Public Library).

One of the benefits to E-LIS versus an institutional depository is the fact that E-LIS is international in scope and provides an excellent way to look outside our own cultures and share and learn from our international LIS colleagues, as well as providing increased access and readership for our work.

Librarians in academic institutions who deposit their own articles will learn how easy it is to self-archive, and will be able to use this experience to answer faculty questions about the open archive process, an especially important benefit with the rise in institutional depositories.

We need Canadian content, so please submit your newsletter and magazine articles, tutorials, or presentations. For example, Heather Morrison has submitted her BCLA Reporter article “The Public Library : A Student’s Second Home” to E-LIS. As for preferred file formats: .pdf and .html are best suited to archiving articles for later retrieval. HTML in particular is excellent as it means your submission can be more easily found on the Web. Files in Microsoft Word are not a preferred format as it is proprietary, and too unstable. Articles can be in any language, but abstracts and keywords must be submitted in English. As long as your article is complete and ready to be entered into a process of communication, it will be welcome in the E-LIS archive.

Any member of the Canadian editorial team will be happy to answer questions about the submission process, or about E-LIS. Have a look at the web site (http://eprints.rclis.org) or subscribe to the RSS feed in your aggregator to see the most recently published articles. At any rate, using E-LIS for research or for self-archiving is a valuable and enriching experience.